Month: May 2009

Somewhere in this hotel, perhaps on a different floor, Sara Robinson has written a fitting tribute to Dr. George Tiller and an analysis of his assassination. I encourage you to read it because it is better than anything I can come up with right now.

Need I say more?

I am in DC now. Headed to see the hippos.

As the United States has grown older, it has expanded the right to vote to nearly every group of citizens, with one notable exception: former felons. Today, 48 states have their own laws that disenfranchise convicted felons at some point during incarceration, probation, or parole. This hodgepodge of policies has created confusion for former offenders and election officials alike, and has resulted in the loss of voting rights for about 5.3 million Americans.
Voting rights experts have long advocated that these unfair laws–which have a disproportionate impact on low-income and minority communities that are overrepresented in the criminal justice system–should be abolished. It’s an opinion apparently shared by President Obama’s new nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, and there are encouraging signs that many states are moving towards restoring the rights of these millions of disenfranchised Americans.

In the 2006 Second Circuit Court case Hayden v. Pataki, plaintiffs brought a challenge under the Voting Rights Act against New York’s felon disenfranchisement law. The plaintiffs argued that, in light of the history of discrimination, both in society and in the New York criminal justice system specifically, the state’s disqualification of felons constituted disqualification based on race. This was rejected by court, as the majority reasoned that Congress did not intend the VRA to apply to state felon disenfranchisement laws.

Second Circuit Court Judge Sonia Sotomayor, however, saw it differently. She joined the main dissent–which found that the New York law amounted to a denial of the right to vote on account of race, and was therefore covered under the Voting Rights Act. Sotomayor also wrote a dissenting opinion of her own in which she found that the VRA “applies to all `voting qualifications,'” and – in her view – the state law “disqualifies a group of people from voting.”  

“These two propositions,” she concluded, “should constitute the entirety of our analysis.”  

Unfortunately, the majority of her colleagues did not undertake a similar analysis, and the result was a distorted interpretation of the Voting Rights Act that, in the words of the attorney Justin Leavitt of the Brennen Center  “effectively amended the Voting Rights Act, giving the green light to racial discrimination.”

Restoration of voting rights for all former felons is still a ways off, but glimmers of hope do exist in legislative and judicial efforts of the recent past. Since 1997, 19 states have amended felon disenfranchisement policies, leading to the restoration of voting rights for at least 760,000 people, according to a 2008 Sentencing Project report.

In Washington State earlier this month, Governor Chris Gregoire signed felon voting rights bill, HB 1517, completing “a nine-year effort by…[Democratic Rep. Jeannie] Darneille to end a system that denied voting rights to former felons until all financial obligations ordered by the courts had been paid in full,” according to the May 6 Seattle Medium.

Under this bill, the voting rights of former felons are restored once they “are no longer incarcerated or in community custody,” a measure that could help as many as 167,000 former felons regain their rights. “Voting rights should never be based on the ability to pay,” said Darneille, who cited studies by Project Vote and other groups that “prove that recognizing the voting rights of ex-offenders reduces recidivism and improves successful outcomes in reintegrating former offenders into society.”

This year, 17 states have introduced bills to expand voting rights of former felons. Currently, only bills in MA, NJ, NY, OK, PA, TN, and TX are pending. Only one U.S. bill, HB 59 – which secures the federal voting rights of certain qualified ex-offenders who have served their sentences –  remains pending in the House Judiciary Committee.

However, substantial reform will require at least the passage of fair and consistent felon re-enfranchisement laws, and their proper interpretation by judges like Sonia Sotomayor.

Some Christian or Roman should call the House of Saud and tell them that, if you cut off someone’s head before you crucify them, you are doing it wrong.

Lately, I have been reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time. At a mere $8.95 from Powell’s Books, I cannot recommend the book highly enough. It’s the story of a remarkably big-hearted and eccentric man who nearly died during his descent from K2 and stumbled into a remote Pakistani village that changed the entire course of his life. He somewhat impulsively promised to build a school for the village in gratitude for their nursing him back to health. He not only built them a school, he began building schools all over the northeast of Pakistan. He focused on building schools that teach a secular curriculum and he emphasized educating girls. Yet, he soon discovered that his efforts were being greatly outpaced by Saudi-funded school-building. The Saudis poured millions of dollars into funding Wahhabi madrassas all throughout Pakistan, including in the remotest mountainous valleys along the border with Afghanistan.

The Saudi influence is really at the heart of the Taliban movement and of the current difficulties that the Pakistani government is having with radical insurgency. Today, the government claims to have retaken the city of Mingora in the Swat Valley. Swat Valley used to be a prime vacation spot for outdoorsmen, but now it is a battleground. It didn’t have to be this way. How did this happen?

It happened because it was easier for the Pakistani government to let the Saudis fund their education budget than for them to do it themselves. Slowly, but surely, the youth of northern Pakistan were radicalized and readied for martyrdom. That might have worked for Pakistan as long as the young mujahideen could be sent to Kashmir or Afghanistan or Chechnya, but now they are being sent south towards the capital, Islamabad.

It is a bitter irony that the least modern, tolerant brand of Islam is controlled and exported by the nation that has both physical control of Mecca and Medina, and control of the largest oil reserves on the planet. No single big-hearted, eccentric American ever stood a chance in a competition with the House of Saud for the hearts and minds of the impressionable youth of upland Pakistan. The United States government probably knows that the real battle in the so-called war on terror is over who will provide the lion’s share of education funding for Pakistan. But, even though we can build six schools for the price of one drone-delivered missile, the schools can’t create one American job while the missile can sustain several.

I truly believe that there are simple solutions available to us that can lesson the threat of terrorism at a low cost, but our government doesn’t seem interested. Let’s help Pakistan educate their youth. Let’s start with that.

Barack and Michelle Obama went to Manhattan tonight to see a Broadway play.

The Obamas plan to attend the 8 p.m. performance of “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” a critically acclaimed production that has been nominated for six Tony Awards, including best revival of a play.

Set in a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” centers on a group of African-Americans searching for their place in the world and coming to grips with the legacy of slavery.

They traveled there in a 12-passenger Air Force Gulfstream V (C-37A). Here’s the Republican response:

“As President Obama prepares to wing into Manhattan’s theater district on Air Force One to take in a Broadway show, GM is preparing to file bankruptcy and families across America continue to struggle to pay their bills,” RNC spokeswoman Gail Gitcho said in an email this afternoon.

That’s not all from Gitcho. She then added a snitty, “Have a great Saturday evening — even if you’re not jetting off somewhere at taxpayer expense.”

It’s not like New Orleans is drowning.

Why did we invade Iraq?

Hey, it’s the Pom-Pom Woman, Michelle Malkin! I bet you don’t know what is the real name of ACORN, do you? Well let the Queen of Internment Camps elucidate you:

Document drop: The truth about ObamACORN

The great truth? ACORN registration drives benefited Obama, and lots of ACORN workers liked Obama. Gee, what a surprise, that a liberal organization dedicated to registering poor voters might prefer Obama/Biden to McCain/Palin. A story the liberal New York Times tried to “kill” when an ACORN whistle blower by the name of Anita Moncrief gave them the goods on the Obama-ACORN connection (except the Times’ Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, says they didn’t):

To emphasize the credibility of Moncrief’s charge against The Times, O’Reilly told his viewers: “Okay, now, that phone call was made by the New York Times reporter to a whistleblower. That’s Anita, okay? The whistleblower testified under oath before Conyers’ committee in Washington that The New York Times killed the story.” He added, “If she lies, a crime, she goes to jail.”

But Moncrief did not testify before Congress. Heidelbaugh did. Tabacoff acknowledged that. “Heidelbaugh represented the Pennsylvania GOP in litigation against Acorn, and Anita Moncrief testified under oath at those proceedings,” he said, adding that Heidelbaugh related Moncrief’s accusations at the congressional hearing. […]

The way Heidelbaugh constructed her testimony, someone who didn’t do some homework could have made the mistake of thinking that she was repeating charges against The Times that Moncrief made under oath. Shortly after saying, “Ms. Moncrief agreed to testify under oath, subject to the penalty of perjury,” Heidelbaugh said Moncrief had told her how The Times killed the “game-changer” story.

I became skeptical about Heidelbaugh because there appeared to be inaccuracies in her testimony about The Times – including her claim that all stories about Acorn stopped after Moncrief revealed to Strom that the Obama campaign had given Acorn its maxed-out donor list. They did not. Moncrief told Strom about the donor list on Sept. 7. The Times published four articles after that date looking into troubles at Acorn. (See below). So, I bought the transcript of Moncrief’s Pennsylvania testimony and saw that she had not accused The Times under oath.

Strom told me that Moncrief was a useful source for several of her Acorn articles and that after Moncrief told her about the Obama donor list, she asked for it, so she could pursue the story. The list Moncrief ultimately provided contained nearly 56,000 entries, but it bore no indication of its origin. It contained what appeared to be a Federal Election Commission number beside each name and dollar amount, but those numbers did not relate to anything in the F.E.C. database.

Strom said she that she made repeated efforts to verify the list and where it came from. Moncrief finally agreed to go on the record, but she was a problematic source for a news article. She had been fired from Acorn after running up personal charges on an Acorn credit card.

The problem for [NYT reporter] Strom and The Times was that, after investing weeks of reporting effort, Moncrief’s allegations could not be independently verified. Despite denials all around, maybe there will turn out to be a story about the Obama campaign and Acorn, but it would involve fairly technical violations of campaign finance law that experts told me are difficult to prove. So far, although Moncrief has gone public with her information, nobody has produced a convincing report that corroborates it.

Somehow the New York Times being involved and refusing to run a story they couldn’t verify makes this all the more nefarious, I guess. Unlike Conservative registration organization which supported Republican candidates with help from — a Republican Presidential campaign organization! And the OBAMACORN conspiracy is so much, much worse than a Republican administration that used the Department of Justice as one of its weapons to purge voter rolls and thus suppress minority votes. But of course, it’s evil when Democrats and liberal activists register new voters and then get them to the polls. It’s all good when Republicans and conservatives deny them their right to vote.

Anyway, have fun chasing after that ACORN under the Obama tree, Michelle. Maybe if you dress up again in your cheerleader outfit you can inspire the troops to fan the flames of the wingnut fever swamp so high that finally the full truth about the worst conspiracy of Liberal/Brown People Voter Fraud in Mankind’s history will be exposed to all and Obama can be impeached (just like back in the day with President Clinton)! Here, I’ll even help you out with a video of your greatest achievement in life to date: